Pulse

By GCN Staff

Boston commits $3.5 million to next-generation firewall

Boston has never had a large-scale data breach or cyberattack, but the city is not waiting around for it to happen.

In an effort to defend against future attacks, the city is committing $3.5 million to develop a next-generation firewall system. The firewall will be ready by the end of the year, according to the Boston Herald, but the plan is to continue to bolster security efforts through 2020.

In addition to the firewall, the city is also preparing for contingencies that could threaten systems and utilities – like the loss of power that led to parts of the Boston Fire Department network going offline. Backup generators prevented the power loss from becoming serious.

“There’s a lot of ongoing work that we have around identifying any place within our technology infrastructure where we think we have got a vulnerability or a system that we don’t think has the right kind of redundancy,” Jascha Franklin-Hodge, Boston’s CIO, told the Herald.